Flight

Shaina Monet

she’s untangled the black from her eyes,
found hands, blue and wooden, worn

once of her body. she picks the dead
skin from her face, and it flakes, leaving

indigo pock marks, where blood should be.

I seem to be returning to the box I wasborn in, she thinks. thin, black stalks in the back

ground the girl in the foreground
on her side, curling. the moist leaf

jacket she wears greens and thickens
into a fur, as the viscera of her lower

belly hardens. sometimes she believes
words have to sit in a notebook of water.

her body tends to curl up, after a rain, when the river
pushes water into the dirt roads and rocks

carrying night on its shoulders, a weight
until it breaks through one, spongy lung

over the flight feathers spreading through
out her body. yes. she has yet to outgrow

this world, this body. there is shedding to do
yet. there, the plumage, wet, sprouting from spine.

Shaina Monet is a New Orleans native and the winner of the 2017 Vassar Miller Poetry Award. She serves as poetry editor of Bayou Magazine and has work forthcoming in Yemassee Journal. Currently working on her first chapbook, she mines family stories, census records, and other legal documents to trace her family history and create poems about her Creole, Native, Irish and African-American ancestors in North America and beyond.